The E-Word, Etc.

Any journalist erudite enough to use the phrase “sure as heck-fire” is worth reading. Here’s the deal.

Kimberly Winston (Religion News Service) writes:

Sinéad O’Connor is not your typical Christian music diva.

Wow! Talk about a lede!

The Irish singer/songwriter has torn up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, refused to have The Star-Spangled Banner played before a concert, been excommunicated after her “ordination” as a Catholic priest and announced that she was a lesbian — before shortly recanting.

Yet with her soon-to-be-released double album Theology, the Grammy Award-winning O’Connor will attempt to make a foray into the mainstream Christian music market when the album is released June 26 by Koch Records …

Gulp. Here.

HT: THUNDERSTRUCK

When it comes to Ecumenism — for which I believe we sorely need a Council — there’s conflicting (even politically competing) voices within the Orthodox Church.

“We are undoubtedly living in a time of world-shaping changes. Events –which are now being directed– are racing along at an incredible rate. Ecumenism is evolving, within the levelling plans of the Globalization that is being imposed by powerful socio-political centers. Nobody really believes any more that Ecumenism can offer a visible solution to the hope for Christian unity.

As Orthodox Christians, we should neither float in the clouds, nor should we lack apprehension. If we truly have a respect for peoples’ lives, if we truly ache for the people of the West, who have been tortured by their religious traditions, as well as for the people of the Orient, who are entrapped in demonic beliefs, we have a duty to remain focused in our Holy Church. We have an obligation to preserve our paternal faith unadulterated, living it authentically in our daily struggle for personal sanctification and theosis. The proper faith and a meticulous way of life will render us worthy witnesses of Orthodoxy and –why not?– worthy of martyrdom, if and when circumstances may demand it…

The persistence in Orthodoxy – or in other words the veridicality of life – and the persistence in the Truth that liberates and saves, is not a form of egoism, fanaticism, or religious intolerance; it is an expression of the universal quality, the love and the philanthropy of the Orthodox Church. And it also comprises the ultimate potential that Orthodoxy can offer, for both a radical spiritual turnabout in the West, but also an outlet for the Orient, to escape from its captivity by false gods.”

The above is taken from HERE.

BTW, though not nearly as cool as “sure as heck-fire,” FYI veridicality means: The correct perception of an object, that is, in agreement with the object’s real properties. Source

Elsewhere, a while back …

“In a context like the Latin American one, with a religious market characterized by bitter competition, where the churches that proliferate the most are opposed to ecumenism, the congress intends to take advantage of the energy of the Assembly to offer new incentives for churches to get to know and to collaborate with each other,” said the congress coordinator, EST ecumenism professor Dr Rudolf Von Sinner.

— World Council of Churches’ (WCC) 9th Assembly. (Feb, 2006)

I shall, out of respect for my age and maturity, refrain from commenting on the ecumenism professor’s last name (above).

Here’s a peg on which these beginning may hang.

From the same site, here’s Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev of the Moscow Patriarchate on Ecumenism and the WCC.

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